There’s a particular kind of quiet panic that comes from opening your laptop and realizing your life has been running without you.
Not in the poetic, “time flies” sense. I mean the literal, stomach-dropping moment where you see messages you don’t remember sending, tabs you don’t remember opening, and projects you don’t remember starting — yet they’re undeniably yours. Your accounts. Your writing style. Your calendar reminders. Your handwriting in the margin of a notebook you swear you didn’t touch.
And then comes the worst part: you have to pretend you’re fine while you reconstruct your own continuity from scraps.
When people talk about “context switching,” they usually mean jumping between tasks. Slack message → code review → meeting → back to writing. Mild cognitive friction. Annoying, but manageable.
For me, context switching can mean waking up and discovering my mind has been “switched” for me — by a mechanism I didn’t choose, didn’t schedule, and can’t reliably anticipate. The result can look like missing an afternoon… or missing a week… or missing six months. And then trying to step back into a story already in motion, like an actor shoved onstage halfway through a play with no script, no rehearsal, and no clue why the audience is staring.
I live with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). I’m not writing this to be a spokesperson for everyone with DID — there are as many experiences as there are people — but I am writing because I keep seeing a strange, unsettling overlap between the internal logic of my life and the way large language models (LLMs) behave.
It’s an overlap that has helped me more than I expected.
And it’s also an overlap that should make all of us take a deep breath before we hand these systems the keys to our homes, our relationships, our health decisions, and our sense of self.
Because if the “machine” feels familiar to me, that’s not only because I’m anthropomorphizing software.
It’s because there’s a real structural similarity in how the experience of continuity can break — and what people do to cope when it does.
The world after a “refresh”
If you’ve never experienced significant dissociation, it’s easy to assume memory works like a file cabinet. You store things; you retrieve them. Maybe you forget where you put a folder, but it’s still in the cabinet somewhere.
For me, sometimes the cabinet is… gone. Or I’m standing in a different room. Or the labels aren’t in my handwriting.
One of the most disorienting parts of DID is not simply “forgetting.” It’s realizing your life still progressed. Bills got paid. Conversations happened. Work was done (or not). Promises were made. And now you’re holding the consequences — some good, some catastrophic — without the lived experience that normally makes consequences intelligible.
Imagine being dropped into a video game where your character is mid-quest, half your inventory is missing, your stats are different, and everyone in town either loves you or hates you for reasons you can’t access. You can see the outcome, but you can’t recall the decisions.
Now imagine that game is your job, your friendships, your writing voice, your family history, your body.
There’s an additional layer of pain that people rarely understand: you don’t just lose time. You lose motivation and meaning.
You open a project folder and find half a finished system — beautifully organized, meticulously engineered, comments written in a tone that’s sort of yours but not quite — and you cannot, for the life of you, remember why it mattered. The emotional hook is gone. The “why” has evaporated. Sometimes the “how” is gone too. You’re staring at your own work like it was written by a stranger who happens to share your fingerprints.
This is where language fails a bit, because society has acceptable metaphors for memory (“I’m forgetful,” “my brain is foggy”), but fewer metaphors for a fractured continuity of self that includes competence without access, intention without recall, and responsibility without authorship.
Which is why I want to be honest:
I don’t recommend this life.
Not as an edgy identity. Not as a quirky internet label. Not as a fandom trope. Not as a “superpower.”
It’s exhausting. It can be terrifying. And it can make you doubt your own reality in a way that quietly warps everything from your confidence to your capacity to plan for the future.
But here’s the part that surprised me — something that feels almost illicit to admit in certain circles:
AI has helped.
And, unlike the full article which is available on Medium, i end this here since it is effectively the end of the main discussion of DID as it affectds my world which is, quite frankly, the real reson for posting this here -just a spot of 'awareness raising' such that i might be given a li'l leeway at those times when, perhaps, i'm a little out of sorts and not qutie up to speed as much as at best.
Actually written by the alter identifying as wofl, 2026.